The "past" section is pretty scanty because it could go on forever. I left off Tachyon: The Fringe, Starlancer, Halcyon Sun, Echelon, AquaNox, DarkStar One, Terminal Velocity, and who knows how many more lost in the mists of time...
What... no mention of Terminus? That was the best Space Sim game I've played in memory.
Proper Newtonian Physics, ship building, large universes, and you could even turn off your reactors shielding and accidentally microwave yourself
I thought Terminus was that first person game that had aliens that could run along the walls and ceilings.
Tremulous.
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
I tried playing Terminus years ago, but the time limits on the missions pissed me off too much. Plus I had no idea what the heck I was doing trying to configure my ship.
True, documentation was sorely lacking. I'm still not sure what half that stuff did.
I still laugh at how overpowered pirates were.
Get mining laser
Mine
Sell ore
mine again
sell ore
get transport ship
double mining lasers and max capacitors
jettison anything that isn't gold
Sell gold
Terrorize system in solid gold space ship.
edit: Hmm, can't seem to get it to run on Windows 7, must experiment with school computers.
Urg, old game blues. I'm trying Wing Commander from GOG and these escort missions are a pain in the ass. I'm flying one in the Dakota sector and all it takes is fifteen seconds for the tankers to get wasted. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. I fire off a few salvos and run out of gun energy, and the ships are so fast I can't get a good lead on them. If I wait until they go after the tanker, it's too late. What am I missing here?
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
Luck, mostly. If it's the one against the Salthis, you should be able to mess them up pretty good when they make a run on a tanker. Try to focus on whichever one is attacking a tanker instead of chasing them around. Give it a good salvo and it should break off. Then just wait for the next one.
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grouch993Both a man and a numberRegistered Userregular
Freespace was released as Descent: Freespace because there was a disk utility in the US named freespace out on the market and the publishers didn't want to have any copyright issues. It was released as Freespace in other markets.
Freespace was released as Descent: Freespace because there was a disk utility in the US named freespace out on the market and the publishers didn't want to have any copyright issues. It was released as Freespace in other markets.
Oh. That would explain why the game I played didn't seem to support my joystick and only wanted to talk about cylinders and heads. I thought the cylinders were enemies.
It also explains why I needed a new computer afterwards.
Mostly just huntin' monsters.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
Urg, old game blues. I'm trying Wing Commander from GOG and these escort missions are a pain in the ass. I'm flying one in the Dakota sector and all it takes is fifteen seconds for the tankers to get wasted. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. I fire off a few salvos and run out of gun energy, and the ships are so fast I can't get a good lead on them. If I wait until they go after the tanker, it's too late. What am I missing here?
You can fail that mission and still advance, if I'm remembering correctly. Don't feel like you have to complete EVERY mission successfully.
Holy crap Elite Dangerous looks good in those shots. Speaking of great looking up and coming stuff, Star Citizen looks awesome but I'm abit worried they are being over ambitious. They've got like full interiors for all the ships they are showing (rock ON!) with stuff like fold out dining tables (wut?) and stuff. I hope they don't run out of money and have like a dozen uber detailed ships and half a game, despite my love of insanely detailed, well designed space ships. *Edit - That said, after reading the brochure for the RSI Aurora...I want one. I want one now. O.O
Also, though not strictly a space sim, I think Strike Vector looks awesome and qualifies if Terminal Velocity does. Check it out if you haven't: http://www.strikevector.net/
(Video in spoiler)
Freespace was released as Descent: Freespace because there was a disk utility in the US named freespace out on the market and the publishers didn't want to have any copyright issues. It was released as Freespace in other markets.
Holy cow, now that I think about it, at the time I had freespace (disk util), Descent AND Descent: Freespace all at the same time. If I remember correctly the disk utility was for Mac wasn't it? Boy that takes me back.
Urg, old game blues. I'm trying Wing Commander from GOG and these escort missions are a pain in the ass. I'm flying one in the Dakota sector and all it takes is fifteen seconds for the tankers to get wasted. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. I fire off a few salvos and run out of gun energy, and the ships are so fast I can't get a good lead on them. If I wait until they go after the tanker, it's too late. What am I missing here?
You can fail that mission and still advance, if I'm remembering correctly. Don't feel like you have to complete EVERY mission successfully.
It's still possible to recover later.
I finished WC1 with a good ending and now am getting trashed on the Hobbes missions in WC2. I feel like I'm shooting the worlds slowest lasers at these damn Kilrathi fighters. A thrown golfball would do more damage. The jump in quality from WC2 to WC3 is really impossible to exaggerate. It's like night and day.
manwiththemachinegun on
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DrakeEdgelord TrashBelow the ecliptic plane.Registered Userregular
I was pretty lukewarm about Starlight Inception back during the Kickstarter and didn't pledge. A little while ago they put out a trailer that I missed until now:
It doesn't look terrible but I'm still sort of skeptical. Notice how the third person camera + crosshair works when the ship turns sharply (like at 0:56 or 1:02 or 1:09 or 1:38). I think this is actually a key thing that separates space sims from each other. There are two main ways to treat the crosshair + the ship in third person that I can think of. One is to lock the crosshair and the ship in the center of the screen and show all movement just via the camera. This is what Freespace does, I think (although nobody plays it in third person) and other games I can't really remember (older space sims that had third person views, generally). The other is to let the ship float more freely, and sort of orbit around the crosshair, which is also looser. This works on a spectrum: some games are super loose (like Star Wars: Battlefront) and others are less loose (Crimson Skies). For space sims, I think I really like the less loose/entirely locked down way of doing things. It feels more like I'm the pilot controlling a ship from the inside - when the ship and crosshair move a bunch, it feels like I'm outside the ship, watching it maneuver around an arbitrary fixed point which I have no control over. I'm more of a director, watching the ship pull off moves that I order it to pull off, than a pilot sitting in the cockpit being moved in the ship. When I'm locked precisely behind the ship, shots come from where I'm sitting and head straight outwards. When the camera is loose like in Starlight Inception, shots from one side of the screen or another and head off at an angle towards a space vaguely described by a line drawn from the direction the ship is facing (which is not straight) to where the crosshair exists somewhere in 3d space (which is determined by the degree to which the ship is turned, something which is not entirely obvious from the crosshair's position alone).
It almost seems to me like two entirely separate design philosophies. I can understand for a game like Crimson Skies why the crosshair and plane would sort of slip from being in the center: gravity and air resistance are dragging on you and as you try to bring your plane around, it's not complying as fast as you'd like. I can put up with that to a small degree, and it also makes some kind of sense, but in space I'm not sure why my thing should behave as if there's air resistance, and moreover spaceships as they work in space sims don't really have to angle themselves the way planes do in order to turn, so the weird swooping/banking thing that ships do when they turn makes less sense. Moreover, Crimson Skies doesn't let the ship slip very much at all, whereas Starlight Inception seems to have lots of give in the camera. Star Wars: Battlefront and Battlefront 2 also have a lot of give, but they're not proper sims so they sort of get a pass.
This is related to another control mechanism: whether the ship has special "moves" for maneuvering or whether everything it does is directly controlled by you. In Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge and Battlefront 2 (and other games - maybe Strike Suit Zero?) planes/ships have "moves" like barrel rolls to the left or right or Immelman turns and stuff - you press a button and they execute these canned animations. Other games, of course, have nothing of the sort (like most space sims). I greatly prefer games without these moves - it just feels fake and "gamey" to do those sorts of things with a button press, often because you can't pull the same thing off just by maneuvering, which is a silly artificial limitation. If my ship can do something, I want to be able to do it as a pilot, not as a guy pressing a button and letting the game take over. The reason I think this is linked to the "loose" camera is because it's the divide between controlling the ship as a pilot and controlling the ship as an outside viewer. You see these "moves" in games that only have third person cameras, and I think that's no coincidence: this stuff would never work in a cockpit, because it would just feel too much like you're losing control, and the "slippage" in the loose camera is really just a small way of making you lose control (in this case, you lose control over the precise heading of your ship, not because you can't control it but because you can't really get a feel for it).
The basic principle is "how much do we want the player to be in charge" vs "how much do we want the player to feel like they're watching something cool." The "loose" style of control is certainly much more visually appealing. Turns are smoother and more grounded in the overall scene - locking the camera behind a ship can be disorienting for sudden maneuvers and it also doesn't look nearly as impressive. The same goes for letting the difference between "push button for barrel roll" and genuine barrel rolls. The nadir of this sort of thing is HAWX and the latest Ace Combat game (I think it's Ace Combat) which both have modes where you basically push a button, go into a ridiculous third person view that doesn't even pretend to be a chase cam, and press buttons to make your plane shoot down other planes while you have pretty much no control. They turn the game entirely into a visual experience at the expense of direct control.
So to me, "loose" cameras are the first step on that spectrum from highly centered, immersive experiences like what we get from X-Wing and Wing Commander towards the more hands-off, movie-like stuff in Battlefront 2. I like to feel like a pilot, not a spectator, which is why I really yearn for stuff like Enemy Starfighter, which looks like it's all about tightness of control rather than sloppy, swoopy handling.
One interesting side note to this thing is Freelancer, which I think is swoopy not in the way I've described but because that works the best with their mouse control. I think this is an entirely different kind of looseness, even though it looks very similar from the outside, because with the way the mouse aiming works, shots basically go where your crosshair is, which means you don't get the loss in aiming accuracy that you get when your ship is deviating from a straight line plane during turns like in games like Starlight Inception, and also Freelancer lets you unlock the mouse from the engines, which means your guns aim independently and you don't have to put up with any "swooping" just to aim your guns. I have other issues with Freelancer (I don't like mouse controls in general for space ships) but I don't think Freelancer gives me the same unhappy feelings as a swoopy camera does in other games.
I feel the same way and can enjoy the loose animations if I still get the "sense" of control if they weren't there. If I pulled an immelman, I'd would have to commit to it until I had come partway through. There are ways out, but I'm willing to overlook that for a fun game.
If that sense and the fun are high, I'm willing to overlook these things, however, if the game is not fun and I'm always worrying if I'm going to loose control, well....
OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
SSZ only has maneuvers in Strike Suit mode, and those maneuvers consist only of quick dodges left, right, up, and down on demand.
Control is pretty well locked onto the ship; it doesn't move around much (though the camera changes its distance from the ship a bit depending on how fast you're going).
I'd put it as relatively "tight" using your description.
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
There are four visceral feedbacks in the combat. An expansion pack will likely be released later on which will add another, fifth visceral feedback.
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DrakeEdgelord TrashBelow the ecliptic plane.Registered Userregular
Seriously that's something they need to do to get me into the series. The flight and combat just has zero tactile quality to it in the X games that I've played. I enjoy the whimsical designs and far out space opera tone that they go for, but I feel so disconnected from everything that I'm actually doing in the game as far as the simulation itself goes. I'd also like to see some better AI, the ships in X3 traveled like brain damaged bumble bees, slamming into stations, gates, me and each other far more often than believable.
That video is pretty exciting though as far as its topic goes. One of my minor quibbles with X3 was that space just didn't feel big enough. This was pretty much down to the fact that everything in a system was boxed in by the gates and crammed so close together. What I saw in the videos didn't give me that feeling so hopefully they've gotten a better about that sort of thing.
Come on X Rebirth, you look like you could be something really amazing. I hope they can shore up the areas I have had issues with in the past because it's something that I really want to love.
It looks awesome. But I'm a little concerned about the new features. These guys do economic sims very well. I'm sure that will be fine. I am also not worried about the scale, and being able to fly through all sorts of nooks and crannies. The control scheme changes look cool. I love the dynamic cockpit.
But the indoor areas could be trouble. I think that after seeing a few, we will see all the same rooms over and over, just rearranged. I mean, how else can they do it? Complete, custom interiors for every station? Seems unlikely.
I will also miss the ability to spacewalk outside your various ships, as that was what sold me on X2 in the first place.
I don't like trading! I like flying big space ships and blowing things up!
Maybe that's why I haven't progressed far in the X games, but I still love them for their atmosphere. Their universes really feel alive. Here's hoping Rebirth lets me be a combat mercenary with more success than in the past.
Xbox Live, PSN & Origin: Vacorsis 3DS: 2638-0037-166
I'm not sure how I feel about it... it looks great, but multiplayer games like this usually have a great and active community for about two weeks after launch.
Posts
Also, Archimedean Dinasty!
Like:
edit: Old thread about Terminus I forgot about.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
If you ever find out, lemme know.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
I still laugh at how overpowered pirates were.
Get mining laser
Mine
Sell ore
mine again
sell ore
get transport ship
double mining lasers and max capacitors
jettison anything that isn't gold
Sell gold
Terrorize system in solid gold space ship.
edit: Hmm, can't seem to get it to run on Windows 7, must experiment with school computers.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Luck, mostly. If it's the one against the Salthis, you should be able to mess them up pretty good when they make a run on a tanker. Try to focus on whichever one is attacking a tanker instead of chasing them around. Give it a good salvo and it should break off. Then just wait for the next one.
Oh. That would explain why the game I played didn't seem to support my joystick and only wanted to talk about cylinders and heads. I thought the cylinders were enemies.
It also explains why I needed a new computer afterwards.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
You can fail that mission and still advance, if I'm remembering correctly. Don't feel like you have to complete EVERY mission successfully.
It's still possible to recover later.
Also, though not strictly a space sim, I think Strike Vector looks awesome and qualifies if Terminal Velocity does. Check it out if you haven't: http://www.strikevector.net/
(Video in spoiler)
Holy cow, now that I think about it, at the time I had freespace (disk util), Descent AND Descent: Freespace all at the same time. If I remember correctly the disk utility was for Mac wasn't it? Boy that takes me back.
I finished WC1 with a good ending and now am getting trashed on the Hobbes missions in WC2. I feel like I'm shooting the worlds slowest lasers at these damn Kilrathi fighters. A thrown golfball would do more damage. The jump in quality from WC2 to WC3 is really impossible to exaggerate. It's like night and day.
Maybe it'd all hook up with a lion's roar like Voltron and turn into Freespace 3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9v7ISI3oMKc
It doesn't look terrible but I'm still sort of skeptical. Notice how the third person camera + crosshair works when the ship turns sharply (like at 0:56 or 1:02 or 1:09 or 1:38). I think this is actually a key thing that separates space sims from each other. There are two main ways to treat the crosshair + the ship in third person that I can think of. One is to lock the crosshair and the ship in the center of the screen and show all movement just via the camera. This is what Freespace does, I think (although nobody plays it in third person) and other games I can't really remember (older space sims that had third person views, generally). The other is to let the ship float more freely, and sort of orbit around the crosshair, which is also looser. This works on a spectrum: some games are super loose (like Star Wars: Battlefront) and others are less loose (Crimson Skies). For space sims, I think I really like the less loose/entirely locked down way of doing things. It feels more like I'm the pilot controlling a ship from the inside - when the ship and crosshair move a bunch, it feels like I'm outside the ship, watching it maneuver around an arbitrary fixed point which I have no control over. I'm more of a director, watching the ship pull off moves that I order it to pull off, than a pilot sitting in the cockpit being moved in the ship. When I'm locked precisely behind the ship, shots come from where I'm sitting and head straight outwards. When the camera is loose like in Starlight Inception, shots from one side of the screen or another and head off at an angle towards a space vaguely described by a line drawn from the direction the ship is facing (which is not straight) to where the crosshair exists somewhere in 3d space (which is determined by the degree to which the ship is turned, something which is not entirely obvious from the crosshair's position alone).
It almost seems to me like two entirely separate design philosophies. I can understand for a game like Crimson Skies why the crosshair and plane would sort of slip from being in the center: gravity and air resistance are dragging on you and as you try to bring your plane around, it's not complying as fast as you'd like. I can put up with that to a small degree, and it also makes some kind of sense, but in space I'm not sure why my thing should behave as if there's air resistance, and moreover spaceships as they work in space sims don't really have to angle themselves the way planes do in order to turn, so the weird swooping/banking thing that ships do when they turn makes less sense. Moreover, Crimson Skies doesn't let the ship slip very much at all, whereas Starlight Inception seems to have lots of give in the camera. Star Wars: Battlefront and Battlefront 2 also have a lot of give, but they're not proper sims so they sort of get a pass.
This is related to another control mechanism: whether the ship has special "moves" for maneuvering or whether everything it does is directly controlled by you. In Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge and Battlefront 2 (and other games - maybe Strike Suit Zero?) planes/ships have "moves" like barrel rolls to the left or right or Immelman turns and stuff - you press a button and they execute these canned animations. Other games, of course, have nothing of the sort (like most space sims). I greatly prefer games without these moves - it just feels fake and "gamey" to do those sorts of things with a button press, often because you can't pull the same thing off just by maneuvering, which is a silly artificial limitation. If my ship can do something, I want to be able to do it as a pilot, not as a guy pressing a button and letting the game take over. The reason I think this is linked to the "loose" camera is because it's the divide between controlling the ship as a pilot and controlling the ship as an outside viewer. You see these "moves" in games that only have third person cameras, and I think that's no coincidence: this stuff would never work in a cockpit, because it would just feel too much like you're losing control, and the "slippage" in the loose camera is really just a small way of making you lose control (in this case, you lose control over the precise heading of your ship, not because you can't control it but because you can't really get a feel for it).
The basic principle is "how much do we want the player to be in charge" vs "how much do we want the player to feel like they're watching something cool." The "loose" style of control is certainly much more visually appealing. Turns are smoother and more grounded in the overall scene - locking the camera behind a ship can be disorienting for sudden maneuvers and it also doesn't look nearly as impressive. The same goes for letting the difference between "push button for barrel roll" and genuine barrel rolls. The nadir of this sort of thing is HAWX and the latest Ace Combat game (I think it's Ace Combat) which both have modes where you basically push a button, go into a ridiculous third person view that doesn't even pretend to be a chase cam, and press buttons to make your plane shoot down other planes while you have pretty much no control. They turn the game entirely into a visual experience at the expense of direct control.
So to me, "loose" cameras are the first step on that spectrum from highly centered, immersive experiences like what we get from X-Wing and Wing Commander towards the more hands-off, movie-like stuff in Battlefront 2. I like to feel like a pilot, not a spectator, which is why I really yearn for stuff like Enemy Starfighter, which looks like it's all about tightness of control rather than sloppy, swoopy handling.
One interesting side note to this thing is Freelancer, which I think is swoopy not in the way I've described but because that works the best with their mouse control. I think this is an entirely different kind of looseness, even though it looks very similar from the outside, because with the way the mouse aiming works, shots basically go where your crosshair is, which means you don't get the loss in aiming accuracy that you get when your ship is deviating from a straight line plane during turns like in games like Starlight Inception, and also Freelancer lets you unlock the mouse from the engines, which means your guns aim independently and you don't have to put up with any "swooping" just to aim your guns. I have other issues with Freelancer (I don't like mouse controls in general for space ships) but I don't think Freelancer gives me the same unhappy feelings as a swoopy camera does in other games.
If that sense and the fun are high, I'm willing to overlook these things, however, if the game is not fun and I'm always worrying if I'm going to loose control, well....
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Control is pretty well locked onto the ship; it doesn't move around much (though the camera changes its distance from the ship a bit depending on how fast you're going).
I'd put it as relatively "tight" using your description.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
That video is pretty exciting though as far as its topic goes. One of my minor quibbles with X3 was that space just didn't feel big enough. This was pretty much down to the fact that everything in a system was boxed in by the gates and crammed so close together. What I saw in the videos didn't give me that feeling so hopefully they've gotten a better about that sort of thing.
Come on X Rebirth, you look like you could be something really amazing. I hope they can shore up the areas I have had issues with in the past because it's something that I really want to love.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
I'd be fine with that except you know, all the combat in the game.
But the indoor areas could be trouble. I think that after seeing a few, we will see all the same rooms over and over, just rearranged. I mean, how else can they do it? Complete, custom interiors for every station? Seems unlikely.
I will also miss the ability to spacewalk outside your various ships, as that was what sold me on X2 in the first place.
I don't like trading! I like flying big space ships and blowing things up!
Maybe that's why I haven't progressed far in the X games, but I still love them for their atmosphere. Their universes really feel alive. Here's hoping Rebirth lets me be a combat mercenary with more success than in the past.
I just want the pew pew
I'm not sure how I feel about it... it looks great, but multiplayer games like this usually have a great and active community for about two weeks after launch.